


Don't Forget Me

by le_chat_vilain



Series: The Joker and the Thief [6]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Suicide Squad (2016)
Genre: Angst, Body Modification, F/M, NSFW, Smut, Suicide mention, death mentions, rape mention, tattooing, torture mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 21:28:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5221442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/le_chat_vilain/pseuds/le_chat_vilain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Thief explains her origins to the Joker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Forget Me

**Author's Note:**

> [TRIGGER WARNINGS: mentions of gore, mentions of death, mentions of torture, mentions of rape, NSFW, choking, hitting, spanking, body modification]
> 
> I love to torture my OCs and this one is no different - in fact I think she’s probably got it the worst of all of them. I’m probably attributing Joker a little more empathy than a sociopath is capable of, but then again I don’t think he’s quite textbook in that regard. Empathy is the ability to understand/comprehend, and I believe he understands why people feel things, he just doesn’t usually care or feel them himself. But she’s not asking him to, and she’s handled her shit in a pretty similar way to how he likely would have - seeking vengeance in an excessive way - and that makes her relatable to him. As for his reaction to all of it, I’m fortunate/unfortunate depending how you look at it, to share a personality type with him, and basically if I was told this information that’s how I’d react; by being blunt and practical about it lol So there you go. 
> 
> Soundtrack: Don't Forget Me by the Red Hot Chili Peppers

It’s been two days since Joker found out who I really am when the questions begin. Admittedly, we’ve been a little preoccupied playing hide the cucumber in every single way we can imagine, but I think it was just a way for me to postpone the inevitable.

He’s untying my wrists from the chain link bed head when he starts.

“So, you ever gonna tell me,” he asks, as I lean forward to stretch my back out and rub my wrists.

“Tell you what?“ I feign ignorance. He pulls me into his lap and starts kneading my shoulders.

“I think you know exactly what,” he whispers in my ear. “Spill it, Arkham.”

“Actually…it’s Hawkins,” I wince when he digs his thumb into a tender spot at the base of my neck. “From the beginning?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

For an hour I answer his questions, until he knows everything about my genealogy that I do.

He knows that Amadeus Arkham lied about what happened to his daughter, that Harriet wasn’t decapitated but she would most definitely never recover entirely from her injuries, not the psychological ones anyway. That he had a patient matching Harriet’s description killed in the way he described so that he could produce a body for the M.E.; he thought the only way to protect her from the lunatics was if nobody knew she existed.

He now knows that when Martin “Mad Dog” Hawkins – my great-grandfather - raped her, he’d left a legacy of his own in her womb. My great-grandmother was shipped off into the care of one of her father’s colleagues in Sydney, where she would be out of harms way and able to be counseled through the ordeal. Misguidedly, Amadeus had thought that perhaps the promise of a son, now safely removed from harms way of course, would be enough to force Hawkins to rehabilitate, that it would drive him to want to be better. He should have known that some men just aren’t capable of better.

By the time his failure had become apparent, young Harrison Arkham Hawkins was an ocean away and irretrievable. He lived in the care of his stand in grandfather after his mother took her own life when he was five, and grew into a fine young man and an upstanding, normal member of society. He lived a normal life, married, and had a son of his own just in time to ship off to the war in Europe, never to return, never to be found. I didn’t have the good fortune of knowing my grandfather, but by all accounts he was a good, honest man, who died in an air strike in the cold Polish winter while trying to rescue his mates from Nazi forces. Some of the diggers who served with him would go on to describe him as being brave to the point of insanity…

That’s when we come to the part that involves me.

“So, your grandpa was a good man, what went wrong with your pops?” he asks me.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay…so you just did him that way because…? Call me cynical, sweetheart, but it sure seemed to me like you had one hell of a vendetta against that guy when you were carvin’ up his chest like a totem pole,” he presses. I sit forward drawing my knees to my chest, and stare down at my clasped hands, the anxiety brewing in my gut at the thought of reliving the hell of my adolescence.

“That’s because I did,” I admit, “doesn’t mean he was a bad man…in fact he was a good man with good intentions. The thing about my family is that we really do either die heroes, or live long enough to become villains, and good intentions? Well you know what they say about the road to hell.”

I think back to being a child, growing up by the beach on the central coast, not a care in the world and shudder when it all rushes back.

Innocent in my Blinky Bill t-shirt and denim overalls looking like an extra from Round the Twist, I’m 8 years old when I find a dead shark on the sand. Not just any shark, she’s a Great White, the mother of them all. The stench is vile, but I pull my shirt over my nose and mouth and reach out to touch her. Any normal child would be fascinated, certainly, but I wanted to cut her open, see what was inside, find out what happened to her. I needed to do it, it was more than intrigue, it was compulsion. So I did. My hand grasps at the tooth on the cord around my neck and I hear the ringing in my ears winding up.

It never seemed to bother anyone when it was things that were already dead. It was chalked up to an over active imagination and a morbid sense of curiosity. My parents enrolled me in extra science classes, let me dissect frogs to my heart’s content until one day, frogs weren’t enough. I caught the neighbour’s Chihuahua and drowned it in the swimming pool, lying about it and saying I’d found it there. It was a vicious, spiteful little rat and everyone hated it, I just did what they all lacked the guts to do. That was when the alarm bells started in the adults’ heads; they all knew there was no way that dog could have gotten out of its own accord. My father would take out a notepad whenever we spoke, frown whenever I asked how something worked or why something was a certain way, and look frightened whenever I would complain about someone I disliked.

That was also around the time my mother was diagnosed with aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. My father finally made the decision to call in family favours that he’d held in his back pocket for decades, and we found ourselves en route back to where it all began. He took a job at Arkham to be closer to top notch treatment for her, Jeremiah promising to keep his name under wraps. Dr. Hawke was the newest shrink in the asylum, and I was eleven years old.

Six months later, my mother lost her fight, and I lost my mind trying to understand how and why it happened. I became fixated on knowing, obsessed with finding an answer.

My father’s horse, Amelia, was the unfortunate target upon which all of my rage ended up firing. The horse had cancer, father had taken her in to see if she could be useful for research purposes, but I’d never seen him do anything with her and it made me furious; what if something in that horse could have saved my mum? I took matters into my own hands. I just had to know what was inside, what it looked like so I could put a picture to the evil that had stolen her from me; stolen the only person who didn’t look at me with fear or treat me like a freak. I figured the horse was going to die anyway, so once again I did what everyone else was too afraid to do, all in the name of knowledge and a quest to fill the void.

He took me there that very night, dumped me in those stony cold walls, discarded the problem that I was as though I was a banana peel and not a person; out of sight and out of mind. I hear the door clang and echo endlessly in my mind and I can feel myself rocking back and forth but I can’t stop doing it.

“Hey,” Joker murmurs, and I feel his hand on my back once more and flinch. I must look terrified when I shoot him a glance over my shoulder, because his eyes widen in surprise. “If you don’t wanna tell me I get it…we’ve all got our shit.”

“I was a child…I was just a heartbroken child…and he just…he just left me there,” I mumble, numbness setting in, staring off at nothing as for the first time I stopped to really process it all. “I needed him, I needed him to tell me everything was going to be okay, step up  and be a father…but he just…threw me away…”

“In Arkham?”

I nod, and recount the events leading up to my incarceration to him.

“…and so he just chucked me in the too hard basket and walked away. He signed every form they handed to him, consented to every procedure, even…” I can’t get the words out.

Of all the things they did to me, that they tried to do to me, that was the worst. To be mutilated like that without a say in it.

“Even what?”

“When I was 19…he let them…” I my hands involuntarily curl into fists and start to shake. Just thinking about it I’m so angry that I can feel my blood pressure surging higher and the temperature of my skin growing hotter; I’m literally burning with rage.

“Baby, what’d they do to you?” He ducks his head down to catch my eyes.

“Well you know what it’s like in there…they electrocuted me, beat me, taunted me…everything short of lobotomizing me and that wasn’t for lack of trying. After I ripped the surgeon’s throat out with my teeth they gave up. Decided it was just something in the blood, something that they couldn’t cure but they sure could stop the spread of…so…they spayed me, like a fucking dog, and then left me to rot.”

The haunting silence hangs there like a dead man on the noose, swinging heavy in a midnight breeze. I watch his face as he processes it, first there’s contemplation, then comes anger, and sadness. Finally he arrives at pity.

“That’s fucked up,” is all he has to say, and I’m glad for it because it’s so accurate and concise a summary that its simplicity is nothing short of hilarious; a fucked up joke, that’s my life.

“Sure is,” I let the soft laugh bubble up from my chest, and fall back into his arms.

Now he knows. He knows I have in me the same sickness that Amadeus had, the insatiable craving to know what makes the world tick and the uncontrollable impulse to solve problems. That there’s no sacrifice too great, no lengths to which I won’t go. That I know right from wrong, but I simply refuse to let those abstract constructs hold me back. He knows that at any moment, I could even turn on him to satisfy that hunger and I’d be powerless to stop myself. Yet still he doesn’t shy away, and I finally pinpoint what it is that pulls me to him so strongly. He’s not afraid of me, he doesn’t seek to control me or cure me, when he sees me he sees a human being, not a monster, and that human being is worth something. He looks at me the same way she did.

“I promise you, I wont throw you away,” With a finger on my chin he turns my head to face him and I’m surprised at the genuineness of his contrition. He’s not going to try and soothe me with hollow sentiments, offer me useless sympathy, or play devils advocate. He tells me what I need to hear, short, sweet, and truthful, and then helps me pick up the needle to sew myself back together again.

“If you ever get the urge to, do me a favour and kill me instead,” I instruct, and I mean it. I couldn’t bear it, to tear open my skin and crack my ribs apart, let someone in my heart again after so long, only for it to be ripped away once more. I’d rather die than find out what that would do to me, what I would do to the world.

“A .45, right here,” He mimes the pistol to my temple with his hand and makes the accompanying noise when he squeezes the fake trigger.

“Better make it a .50, just to be sure,” I suggest, twisting around and pushing him back with my index finger jabbed squarely in the centre of his chest. He gives way to the momentum and falls onto his back with a grin as I crawl on top of him, running my lips up his throat and my hands up his arms to pin his wrists beside his ears. Just like that, I stuff my skeletons back in their closet like Halloween decorations on November 1st.

“Anything you want, baby,” he tells me, and I lean my face down to his, brushing his lips with mine, teasing him and pulling away every time he tries to kiss me.

“Right now, all I want…” I purr, taking his ear lobe between my teeth and tugging, “…is to ride you…until I forget it all ever happened…”

“I think I can get onboard with that…”

“I wasn’t exactly giving you a choice…” I inform him with a wicked smirk. He pretends to look offended but can’t keep a straight face, especially not once I slide my hips back and gradually glide him into me, releasing his wrists and scratching my nails down his arms as I sit up. I look to the ceiling as I savour the feeling of him filling me, the sigh I breathe fusing with his groan. I start to rock my hips and he matches my glacial pace effortlessly, running his hands up my thighs to grab my ass. When he squeezes I look back down at him and he grins at me before lifting his palm and spanking me full force, the noise reverberating off the walls around us and the sting tingling across my skin. Without hesitation, I slap him across the face leaving my hand there to grip his jaw, and shake my head with a snicker. I lean forward and kiss him hard, then let it slip down to his throat before rising again and picking up speed.

Every time his hand smacks against my backside I squeeze a little harder and move a little faster until I can’t concentrate on both anymore and I let him go. That’s when he strikes. Catching both of my hands and pulling them together behind me, he forces me to arch right back so he can hit me right in that sweet spot.

“Gotcha,” he growls with a Cheshire cat smile. He holds my wrists in one hand, and with the other, pulses his thumb against my clit. I squirm and moan as he flicks, swirls, and pinches, until I’m bouncing like a jackhammer and singing like a bird straight across the finish line. When that floating feeling hits me and I’m too weak and disoriented to control my own body, he hugs me to his chest and flips us over so that he’s on top. I rake my nails down his back and he rolls against me, one hand clamped like a vice on my thigh and the other knotted with my hair in a fist, until I feel him spill inside me. We stay like that for a moment, breathless and sweating, foreheads touching, listening to the sounds of our exhaustion and clinging to each other as if under the absurd impression that two people could somehow be closer. Eventually the pins and needles set in and I can’t keep my legs wrapped around him anymore. He relinquishes his grip on me and leans on his elbows, sweeping an errant lock of hair off my face in an unexpectedly tender gesture.

“How those traumatic memories doin’?” he asks, lips curling when his eyes find mine.

“Memories?” I pant with a satisfied smile. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

I lied; they’re still there, I just feel a bit better about them now I’ve shared the load. We finally part and he moves to lay beside me. I find myself rubbing my hand over the grizzled scar that runs from my belly button down until it intersects with another that sits just below where my pants usually do. He props himself up onto his elbow and looks down, carefully moving my hand out of the way so he can see.

“Yeesh,” he cringes.

“What, don’t tell me you hadn’t noticed them?”

“Actually I really hadn’t, but damn…” I flinch and cover them with my arm when he says it, but he pulls it away to trace his fingers over the gnarly bumps and valleys.

“You really hate ‘em don’t you?” he asks me, and I nod, trying not to cry. “I’ve got an idea, come with me…”

He swings his legs off the side of the bed, pulling on his pants and reaching out to take my hand. I let him help me up and wrap one of his button ups around me, following him back out into the kitchen.

“Up on the table,” he urges and I comply, still not entirely sure what’s going on. He grabs a metal case from the cupboard above the fridge and a box of latex gloves from under the sink. Flicking the latches on the case, he pops it open and I recognize a tattoo gun, and the faint smell of disinfectant and ink warms my heart. He plugs it into the socket and snaps on a pair of gloves before grinning back at me. “Well, whaddaya say?”

“Do it,” I eventually answer, lying down and opening the shirt up to expose my torso.

“So, I can cover ‘em, or…” He looks at me with questioning eyes as he preps my skin. What he’s asking me of course is whether I want to hide from my past, or own it.

“…no…don’t cover them,” I take the skin marker from his hand and mark myself up like I’d just been to the surgeons office. I dash lines over the silvery pink skin and scribble ‘CUT HERE’ below the bottom horizontal scar before handing it back to him. He raises his brow at me and tilts his head nodding in approval, then bends down to add something of his own. When he straightens up, I can see he’s drawn a pair of scissors that appear to be cutting into me down along the line of the vertical scar. He looks to me and cocks his head to the side, asking me what I think without a word. I give him an answer with an approving smile and a nod.

“Now…you know, over scar tissue like that…”

“It’ll hurt more, yeah, I know. Kinda counting on it,” I want to feel this, I want to feel pain there again and know it’s on my terms this time. I need to feel it.

“Let’s do this then.”

He wasn’t kidding, the pain is so much more than usual, almost enough to negate that exquisite dopamine rush I get from the scratching of the needle dragging over my skin. I tough it out for just over an hour before he announces he’s done, and wipes the last of the excess ink and blood away. I slither off the table and rush back into the bedroom, swinging myself up to stand on the bed so I can get a good look in the mirror.

I stare, hovering my trembling hand over the lines, marveling at the depth and dimension he’s created on the scissors; how real they look, like you could just reach out, loop your fingers through the handles, and keep cutting. I’m completely lost for words, I just stand there, slack jawed and silent as tears well in my eyes.

“Whaddaya think?” I hear him call out, and see his reflection in the mirror behind me. He’s leaning against the door frame, arms crossed, grinning at me, a roll of cling wrap in one hand.

“I…I…” I stammer, still unable to put into words exactly how I feel right now. He swaggers over and springs up onto the bed to stand behind me, arms looping under mine and head resting on my shoulder. Our eyes meet in the glass and he kisses me on the neck as he binds my stomach with the plastic.

“I’ll never let anyone hurt ya like that again, okay? Never. I promise.”


End file.
